Hi Everyone,
A common desire among many creators is finding new ways of increasing the reach/readership of their series.
One place where many comic readers consolidate at are comic cons, offering not only a very efficient targeted marketing approach, but also a readership we have found to be largely untapped. To give you some idea of scale, San Diego Comic Con is one of the largest in the United States, with an approximate attendance of 140,000.
Currently, we're in the preliminary phases of planning a possible printing of a TAPASTIC #0 comic book. The comic would be an anthology/sampler of up to 14 4-page color comics by Tapas creators printed on newsprint. Here's an example:
The comic would be saddle bound, with a 60# cover and 32# interior pages, essentially the same as comic books back in the 90s. By using newsprint, printing costs can be kept to a reasonable amount.
These comics would then be distributed gratis at conventions, reaching thousands of new readers.
While the associated costs in doing such would be immense for a single creator, if many joined together, the individual expense would go down dramatically. The question is, how many creators are willing to invest money into promoting their own series?
We've already done a significant amount of legwork associated with such an endeavor. It works out to approximately $120/page for 10,000 copies distributed at a single regional convention with 25,000 attendance. Of course as more copies are printed the cost per page goes down and more conventions can be attended, but for now we just want to gauge what interest, if any, there would be in such a project.
Comic books get about 2.5 views per copy, as friends and family share, so the total reach would be 25,000 potential new readers for all the series that participate.
There is also an option to create a variant cover with an issue price of $1.99 that creators could sell on their own however they like. The books would be sold at cost (~$.40) and creators would be able to keep their individual profits, if the group as a whole agreed to that arrangement.
Ideally we would love to take this idea even bigger than 10k copies at a single convention, but first we need to find out if anyone would be interested in participating.
Best!
-Golden Plume Comics